Asus is the company that shook up the laptop market a couple of years ago with their introduction of the EeePC netbook. And with their announcement that they will no longer be producing netbooks in 2013, Charles Arthur over at the Guardian UK has declared that the netbook era has now come to an end. Sad news for those of us who still love our netbooks! Harry McCracken over at Time Mag thinks they'll be back. Anybody who spends time wiping the smears off their tablet's touchscreen might agree.

I have a Toshiba Thrive, which is a tablet but with real USB port so I can hook a real keyboard and mouse. I can with bluetooth as well. But it isn't quite as good. Yet with hacker's keyboard I can type short messages. So it works for browsing, but as someone pointed out, not really for development.

Perhaps the replacement might be a cheap ultrabook. There were small laptops before the netbook - my old Avaratec is only slighty larger and had a DVD drive.

Netbooks were cheap, until you started adding bluetooth, an eternal optical drive, and the rest. So we will see - it may still live in something which is a bit more powerful but small but not that much more expensive.